Contents

Not again Microsoft. Incidents like these were one of the reasons why I threw your crappy products out of my door and migrated to GNU/Linux.

Well, now I did not know where was I. After two stops, the bus came to a halt. It was not the NATO stop. The driver said something in French, which meant that’s the last stop. I told him that I wanted to go to NATO. He said bus won’t go there. The message was supposed to flash on the display, but Microsoft Windows screwed it. My appointment was at 12 and it was already 11.50. I was 3 Km away from the NATO HQ.

Graphics Stack and Compiz

While NVIDIA is already in the middle of working on the 280 driver series and there’s been a public beta of that, this Friday morning NVIDIA has released a new 275.xx stable release. While this release is still tagged in the 275 series, it does contain a few worthwhile fixes and new hardware enablement.

There’s been an odd case that I’ve not seen one window manager be able to handle correctly. It’s the case where you are required to resize a window to be smaller than than it’s defined minimum size, because you are tiling it, semi-maximizing it or maximizing it. Basically attempting to fit a big object into a small space because the user requested it.

Games

There is one category of software that many see as being unsustainable as free software: Free video games have lagged behind other areas of free software, and the reasons behind this are fairly simple.

New Releases

A new distribution flew onto my radar today and thought it might be interesting to take a quick look. Linvo is Bulgarian hailed distribution based on Slackware featuring the GNOME 2.32 desktop. Yesterday, developers released Linvo 2010.12.6.

I say new because it’s new to me and the Distrowatch database, although its version numbers go back to 2009.0. News posts on the Website start March 13, 2009 with what appears to be the first release on March 28, 2009.

I’m very happy to announce the stable release of Kongoni 2011 (codename Firefly). Most bugs and glitches have been removed and we can say now that Kongoni is ready for the stable release.

Some extensive work has went into the Live CD and initrd. We have moved to initramfs for the Live CD, udev is used now and there is no limitation in space when creating the initramfs as we dropped dd and mkfs.ext2 in favor of cpio. This also should make the Live CD a bit faster and much more reliable.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

PCLinuxOS has all the tools it needs to be one of the best Linux or BSD desktop distributions, but for some reason, they always manage to miss the mark. It is understandable that for a community distribution, the community decides it wants, but at some point, the developer(s) should take a stand and educate the less knowledgeable member if the community why certain ideas should not be implemented. Comments posted by some of its members here should give you an indication of what I am trying to convey.

Gentoo Family

This week has been excellent in terms of progress. The Gearman worker/client is now complete, and can be used to queue builds. I’ve tested this setup on a few different machines and it seems pretty solid as long as you configure the paths correctly. Also, as part of this, builds will now isolate all their activity into a single directory. It’s not chrooted as such, like I said in my previous progress report, because the use of binaries from the host is required. I’m not entirely sure chrooting makes any sense after giving it some more thought, because they’d still be root and they could break back out of the chroot anyway. However, all input to this tool is heavily sanitised before it reaches Gearman, so the potential threats should be dealt with before they even reach the build tool.

Red Hat Family

BY going through some famous books about magic, James Whitehurst hopes to find a spell that can create an even closer bond between him and his nine-year-old twins, Jack and Emma. He finished reading the whole Harry Potter series last year in the hope that he could share more with his son and daughter, whom he says are so fascinated with the fantasy tales of the boy wizard.

You see, while Whitehurst is passionate about his job, nothing is more important to him than his family. “Family always comes first,” the president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc, the world’s leading provider of Linux and open-source solutions for the Internet, tells StarBizWeek.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Over the years of ubuntu we have seen a lot of really passionate people getting ubuntu tattoos or awesome hair cuts with ubuntu brands and we all have t-shirts and branded clothes. I’m not much of a tattoo or crazy hair guy, but i do have another passion and i managed to get both together, so i got this customized and brand new item…

Phones

Android

That’s what I thought when I heard Toshiba was introducing its own tablet, another “me too” in the Android space, the Thrive.

I mean, we’ve already got the Motorola XOOM, the Acer Iconia A500, the Asus Transformer, and now the ultra-sexy and thin Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is generally regarded as the front-runner out of all of these devices and the only one of this group that currently presents any real challenge to Apple’s iPad 2.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Asus released a netbook that comes with an unusually large 12.1-inch screen and — at least in some markets — Ubuntu Linux. The Eee PC 1215P includes a dual-core Atom N570 processor, 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, up to 2GB of RAM and 320GB of hard disk storage, six hours’ battery life, and optional Bluetooth, the company says.

First, Project Harmony has released version 1.0 of its contributor agreement templates. Version 1.0 includes a rather nifty Agreement Selector tool that generates both individual and entity agreements for your project. Project Harmony does not come down on the side of license-in versus assignment-in; its primary benefit is to assure standardization of language regardless of approach. Check it out.

When I was finishing high school I was destined to continue my academic life studying Architecture. I took special art classes to get prepared to study one of the fine arts I always loved, and so I did, I entered the architectural school at my hometown in the Canary Islands.

Events

Web Browsers

Surely not a difficult question to answer? Just look at the statistics for security vulnerabilities- especially those that were exploited by malware “in the wild” before a patch was issued and how long those vulnerabilities remained unpatched.

Mozilla

Anyone who was around during the original browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape might remember the ill-fated ‘webtops’ that both Microsoft and Netscape attempted to create. In both cases, each company tried to build a kind of operating system shell that centered around the Web browser as the main or only interface.

These early webtops were both horrible failures that basically set the whole idea of browser-as-operating system back 10 years. But maybe they were just way ahead of their time. Because now, two of the browser leaders are once again pushing browser-only interfaces.

Databases

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

If yesterday’s announcement by IBM is any indication, the answer is “not likely,” despite the fact that Big Blue’s latest commitment to OpenOffice, on its surface, sounds like good news. The reason? It’s too little, and too late. Here’s why.

First, let’s start with the announcement. As reported in various venues (e.g., ComputerWorld, The Register and Heise Online), IBM will be donating the standalone source code for its ODF-compliant Lotus Symphony office suite to the Apache Foundation. As you’ll recall, Oracle became the owner of OpenOffice after acquiring Sun Microsystems. After issuing various mixed signals, Oracle officially decommitted to supporting OpenOffice, and contributed the code in early June (but not the trademark) to the Apache Foundation, where it can now be downloaded under version 2.0 of the permissive Apache License.

Oracle’s lawsuit against Google is “a test case really for whether or not Oracle will be able to monetize Java in the mobile space,” according to IDC’s Al Hilwa. Developers use Java for the attractive tool that they know and love at the top end of the technology. But whether at the bottom end of the technology it breaks any of the rules with the way the Dalvik engine works is what is being tested.

AN anonymous poster found this blog item (“DoD: 24,000 files swiped in March from military contractor systems”) which suggests that “Because they use Windooze about 24.000 (!) classified documents got stolen by foreign state-backed hackers. The documents included information on, among other things, JSF and the ballistic missile defense.

“If they’d used Linux this probably wouldn’t have happened. Congress needs to legislate a government ban on using Windows, as it’s unreliable and insecure BY DESIGN.”

Techrights wrote about the subject of Windows compromising many lives. It did so many times before, so to avoid repetition we’ll cite one of the earliest such posts and quote Jim Allchin of Microsoft as saying: “It is no exaggeration to say that the national security is also implicated by the efforts of hackers to break into computing networks. Computers, including many running Windows operating systems, are used throughout the United States Department of Defense and by the armed forces of the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

Did Microsoft Just Admit Hotmail Is the Most Hijacked Service?

[...]

Dick Craddock, Group Program Manager, Hotmail, writes in a company blog, “We released this feature a few weeks ago. Initially, it only let you report Hotmail accounts that were compromised. But it worked really well – we got thousands of reports of compromised accounts.”

Those “thousands of reports of compromised accounts” apparently “worked really well”. Priceless. As we pointed out some years ago, Hotmail is a top source of SPAM. Security there is an absolute joke and no wonder companies choose Google over Microsoft for such services.

As Microsoft continues its steady decline (as discussed in last night's show) it will be remembered as the company which did not take security seriously. The costs of getting cracked were simply passed to the customer. █

App developers are withdrawing their products for sale from the US versions of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market for fear of being sued by companies which own software patents – just as a Mumbai-based company has made a wide-ranging claim against Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and a number of other companies over Twitter-style feeds, for which it claims it has applied for a patent.

Software patent owners in the US have latched onto potential revenue streams to be earned from independent developers by suing over perceived infringements of their intellectual property – which can be expensive for developers to defend even if they are successful.

Now developers in Europe are retreating from the US to avoid the expense and concern such “patent trolls” are causing.

Well, here in the UK software patents and patent trolls are almost unheard of and those who are seeking software patents in the UK often just file for a patent overseas, in the USPTO that corresponds to one of the largest target markets.

The article above makes reference to this lawsuit on which CNET makes the following claims:

More than 30 companies, including the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and IBM have been targeted by India-based Kootol Software for allegedly violating technology covered in a patent application.

Brad Feld, the US-based VC and co-founder of the Foundry Group, has been saying or at least implying that software patents may reduce incentive to invest in companies. In his new column he states that:

More specifically, I think that if the government completely left the software / Internet industry alone and software patents were abolished, the software / Internet industry would have even more vibrant competition.

Just watch what software patents are doing to Android these days. Google hires lawyers rather than developers and according to this update from Groklaw, software patents are also reducing productivity of managers, not just programmers:

So Oracle has asked the court’s permission [PDF] to depose Larry Page of Google along with three other Google employees. Exciting news?! Not really. In fact, if anything this strikes me as a bit of tit-for-tat. Google requested Larry Ellison’s deposition so Oracle is going to do the same with Page.

This is because of software patents. What is the US system doing to itself with this ludicrous patent office? Things are bad enough as they are. Software patents are a total distraction. █